Wagner James Au reports on virtual worlds, VR & Internet culture

Sunday, August 24, 2008

67K Reached: Is SL's Peak Concurrency Plateau At An End?

As of the last hour, a five month plateau period has finally, decisively ended. In late March, Second Life's peak concurrency reached 66,429, a record number of Residents in-world. Up until then, this peak was growing at an average of 500 per week. Since then, however, peak concurrency has flattened, usually reaching somewhere between 64-66,000 at the world's activity apex, generally every Sunday at 2-3pm SLT.

That's changed today. The peak concurrency is currently a record 67,335, up nearly a thousand from its previous record in March. (Homepage screen capture above, inset within a pic of the dynamic in-world map in-world.) This sudden spike in growth is happening, it's worth noting, even though "Popular Places" has been removed from the latest version of the viewer. (A tab that's widely blamed for hordes of bots and free money campers employed to artificially drive up a land's Traffic.) Too soon to tell if this is an anamoly, or pin down the precise reason(s) for the jump, but it's a significant milestone of some kind.

I think it is great. However the "plateau" was a constant during an annual downturn in activity. Therefore the flat line was actually an upward curve if plotted against historical trends. Therefore the Lab needs to get super busy on raising concurrency capability to 150,000 real soon now.

As for the popular places being gone... a whole lot of people are still using old style browsers with the channel command line parameter. So the new search/showcase is not a full factor. However it is a serious improvement. At least in my grateful opinion.

As for bots they are going to be used as long as they are a form of income. I recently went to a very popular club that had about 50 avatars. Some appeared to have timer based gesture activity and canned statements that would repeat from time to time mimicking conversation that made zero sense. So I asked around to see what was going on. Not a single response. All the avatars there were robots including the club "staff" and "DJ". Since there is a random money orb there I can safely assume the bots are just there to collect L$ in a form of non camping camping.

Bots are here to stay. And they have good uses so I am not concerned. I simply choose to not be a customer of operations that are using blatant traffic falsification bots. It will be a while before everyone figures out traffic boosting bots are a waste of time.

Besides people are paying for profile picks now since picks are higher on the list of relevancy factors in search.

Funny thing about the new search. If you know what your clientele are looking for and write ads effectively then a L$50 ad is effective.
That is unless you are trying to break into one of the over saturated markets such as skins. I think it will sort itself out over time. The market leader board is changing and the old dynasties may not be on top forever.

It's nice to see the 64k glass lag ceiling removed... now if only they can keep logins up :) There's something magical about the point at which SL logins have hit the plateau over the last 6 months. It's been mysteriously close to 65,536 - which programmers will notice is the highest value for a 16bit integer number. It's almost like it was hardcoded in (or some forgotten number was stored in an int somewhere in the server code.)

Whatever the glass ceiling was or is, it's stuck persistently around that figure. However unlikely it may seem maybe it was a simple bug. Perhaps they found the lint that caused it :)

Well, I had the 'there are too many users so logins are disabled' message *twice* yesterday at one hour intervals, which as I have a paid for premium account is massively irritating as premium users were promised login priority but we still can't get in because of all the bots farms.
It's difficult to believe how mentally retarded the people who are still running these must be. The worst now are the bot farms in the sky which are supposed to drive traffic but have no discernable effect on search rating and simply add lag. Camping bot farms are almost as bad - someone really should tell the people who own those bots in words of very few symbols that the profit from camping is less than the cost in electicity of running the computer.

Add another one to the list of those curious about 'login priority.' It would be interesting to know if that got killed just from its announcement, since I don't remember seeing *anything* from them after the initial statement. I do think it would be a reasonable incentive for Premium upgrades - myself included (as I've been Basic for about 2 yrs now)...

As for breaking the plateau, hold on there. I won't be fully interested in that news until you actually get consistent growth again. They may have just raised that ceiling slightly.